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I have met many smart poor people. I have met many dumb rich people. I've never met someone with business savvy who was poor (for long). As near as I can tell,

by roc 17y ago

I have met many smart poor people. I have met many dumb rich people. I've never met someone with business savvy who was poor (for long). As near as I can tell, capitalism doesn't reward the smart at all. But it rewards those with business savvy. Maybe some people call that intelligence. I don't. It's more an ability to shrewdly calculate just how much you can take advantage of other people and get away with.

ajju 17y ago
Are you saying that being business savvy always requires taking advantage of other people?
- roc 17y ago
  No. I'm saying that it requires the awareness of how you could. E.g. Being an intelligent chemist necessarily implies that you could, say, build a bomb. You might never do it. And if you did, you might do it in as-ethical a way as possible. But you still need to know how to blow things up. Similarly with business. You may never leverage that knowledge, but someone else might. And you need to know how to protect yourself from that.
  - ajju 17y ago
    I see. In my experience people who take advantage of other people may gain in the short run but in the long run they always lose. Most people I deal with are not stupid (and I prefer it that way). They can tell when they are being taken advantage of and would not put up with it. Dealing with them fairly, sometimes at my own expense, has worked in my favor in the long run. But it makes sense that you be smart enough to know when you are being taken advantage of.
gjm11 17y ago
Suppose you meet someone who is poor. How do you tell whether they have "business savvy", and how do you avoid your judgement of that being affected by the fact that you know they're poor?
- roc 17y ago
  It's all just anecdotal evidence. You can't just point at someone and I could to tell you how savvy they are. I just note the people I know who come out ahead or behind in their dealings, just as I note when someone says something fairly profound, finds a rather ingenious solution or writes a bit of clever code to guesstimate intelligence. I wasn't representing it as anything other than a working theory from personal data. But it's not like Adams started from a statistical argument either. I figured my experiences and generalizations were a fair response to his.
lionhearted 17y ago
> It's more an ability to shrewdly calculate just how much you can take advantage of other people and get away with. This assumes that the path to getting wealthy is "taking advantage of other people just how much you can get away with it" - it's not. Most wealth building are positive sum games. Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
ahlatimer 17y ago
I've known plenty of people that have risen to the top without stepping on everyone along their way. My father, for one, built his own small fortune without having to destroy others along the way. He happened to take the right risks, work his ass off, and became a leader in an industry. If you talk to anyone who has worked with or for him, you'd find very, very few people that have anything negative to say about him. In fact, his ability to do things without "taking advantage of others" has bred a huge amount of loyalty in those that worked with him. I'd reckon that loyalty is what made him successful more so than anything else.

by roc 17y ago

ajju 17y ago

Are you saying that being business savvy always requires taking advantage of other people?

roc 17y ago
No. I'm saying that it requires the awareness of how you could. E.g. Being an intelligent chemist necessarily implies that you could, say, build a bomb. You might never do it. And if you did, you might do it in as-ethical a way as possible. But you still need to know how to blow things up. Similarly with business. You may never leverage that knowledge, but someone else might. And you need to know how to protect yourself from that.
- ajju 17y ago
  I see. In my experience people who take advantage of other people may gain in the short run but in the long run they always lose. Most people I deal with are not stupid (and I prefer it that way). They can tell when they are being taken advantage of and would not put up with it. Dealing with them fairly, sometimes at my own expense, has worked in my favor in the long run. But it makes sense that you be smart enough to know when you are being taken advantage of.

gjm11 17y ago

Suppose you meet someone who is poor. How do you tell whether they have "business savvy", and how do you avoid your judgement of that being affected by the fact that you know they're poor?

roc 17y ago
It's all just anecdotal evidence. You can't just point at someone and I could to tell you how savvy they are. I just note the people I know who come out ahead or behind in their dealings, just as I note when someone says something fairly profound, finds a rather ingenious solution or writes a bit of clever code to guesstimate intelligence. I wasn't representing it as anything other than a working theory from personal data. But it's not like Adams started from a statistical argument either. I figured my experiences and generalizations were a fair response to his.

lionhearted 17y ago

> It's more an ability to shrewdly calculate just how much you can take advantage of other people and get away with. This assumes that the path to getting wealthy is "taking advantage of other people just how much you can get away with it" - it's not. Most wealth building are positive sum games. Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

ahlatimer 17y ago

I've known plenty of people that have risen to the top without stepping on everyone along their way. My father, for one, built his own small fortune without having to destroy others along the way. He happened to take the right risks, work his ass off, and became a leader in an industry. If you talk to anyone who has worked with or for him, you'd find very, very few people that have anything negative to say about him. In fact, his ability to do things without "taking advantage of others" has bred a huge amount of loyalty in those that worked with him. I'd reckon that loyalty is what made him successful more so than anything else.